Young editors of Early Harvest Magazine, a literary magazine written, edited and published by a group of primary school students in Footscray. Photo: Photo: Jason South

"It turns feral and eats you, damning you to unicorn hell.

You see water everywhere. A monkey called Mopo approaches you and adds you on Facebook, only to defriend you immediately."

You decide to kill the monkey, cook and eat him. Wrong again.

"The foul taste of his flesh makes you regurgitate. You choke on your own insides."

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"You die."

Don't feel too bad; you never stood a chance. You are at the mercy of three 11-year-old girls, just now huddled at a small wooden table in Footscray, giggling over the myriad ways they can kill - or at least maim - you.

Maeve, Poppy and Halima, all students at Footscray Primary School, are working on a "choose your own adventure" story. In their hands, it has become an absurdist labyrinth of death, danger and devastation. Unicorn armies, pig-human hybrid babies and other unfathomable curiosities await you at every turn.

Your fate will unfurl in the next issue of early harvest, a literary magazine written, edited and published by a group of primary students at 100 Story Building, a children's writing centre based in Footscray. Maeve, Poppy and Halima form part of early harvest's editorial board - 10 discerning young people aged 10 to 12 - who have read nearly a hundred fiction and poetry submissions from neighbourhood schoolchildren. They selected about a dozen to feature in the magazine's 2014 issue, which was set for publication on November 15.

The kids have chosen stories based on one inscrutable theme, "the unknown", a meditation on questions even grown-ups can't answer: what is out there? What is next? What is just around the corner?

Some dark places, if these stories are anything to go by.

"The principal, Mr Jennings … falls to the ground, blood trickling from his head. The eerie look on his big blue eyes staring blankly at the ceiling will probably haunt the boys forever," reads one of the short-listed submissions, a story called Possessed.

"A second later somebody grabbed her and pulled her up into the attic. She couldn't scream because a hand was over her mouth. She was never seen again," reads another story, The Missing Girl.

The early harvest kids meet here on Wednesdays after school, when they discuss submissions, publication and cover illustrations, with help from industry mentors includingThe Lifted Brow's Sam Cooney and Kill Your Darlings's Emily Laidlaw.

Amarlie Foster, early harvest's 24-year-old project co-ordinator and kid-wrangler, says she and other mentors asked the young editors to brainstorm a theme by writing down words or phrases they liked. "What came up was stuff about fate, the meaning of life. One of them said, 'I guess we're talking about things that are unknown.' It sort of stuck," she says.

On one Wednesday in September, the kids describe their theme to two engineers from Skunk Control, an organisation that will design a new window installation to coincide with the launch. The group has varying interpretations of the theme, but they are thinking big.

"Things like, you don't know what's going to happen to you after you die. Things that we haven't really, as humans, found out yet," Greta says.

"I think of death and black holes and a lot of black and nothingness," Maeve says.

Foster agrees that the kids do seem to have a preoccupation with dark motifs. She says she worried at first about some of the submissions, one in particular, which tackled death and alcoholism. The kids loved it. "They were like, 'It's fantastic, really well written,'" she recalls. "Maybe I have this fear in my head that they should be younger than they are."

She is not alone. Many adults, especially concerned parents, want to sanitise children's stories. The Grimm brothers started taking the sex and gore out of their collection of fairy tales back in the 1800s. And Walt Disney is credited with finishing the job. In the Grimms' version of Cinderella, the heroine's two stepsisters cut off their toes and heel to fit into the glass slipper. They have their eyes picked out by doves at Cinderella's wedding, a development that did not make it to Disney's 1950 film.

Yet some of the most venerated children's authors of the English language - Maurice Sendak, Roald Dahl, Judy Blume and E.B. White - knew that childhood was a darker affair than finger-painting and ice-cream sundaes. White once chastised publishers who felt the spider in Charlotte's Web would "revolt" young readers: "I think it is too bad that children are often corrupted by their elders in this hate campaign."

Foster says that when she talked further to the kids involved in early harvest, she got the impression they were preoccupied less with death than the meaning of life. "They were very interested in the idea of cosmic possibilities, parallel universes, alternate realities.

"I think maybe that's just what kids are like," she says now. "I think they're all really bright kids as well. So maybe they're a bit more existential than most."

Dr Louise Phillips, a professional storyteller and education lecturer at the University of Queensland, says Western nations are fixated on shielding children from the public sphere. So kids turn to their imaginations. "Children look to have some kind of power, agency and push the boundaries. Their imagination - we can't control that."

Phillips says this does not mean that children need to be exposed to violence. She says there is a healthy way to approach difficult subjects - by talking openly about what young people already see around them, and the things they imagine. She says reading and writing programs, such as those at 100 Story Building, invite children to ask, to worry and to wonder. They get to choose their own wild, dangerous, adventures - within the relatively safe confines of the written word.

In one short-listed submission, still "untitled," a young writer flees his town after an apocalypse has "scooped everybody up but me".

"So here I am, riding out of where I have always lived, into the blackness of the night, into the unknown."

Early harvest'seditors and most of the featured writers are nearing adolescence. The so-called "real world" is waiting for them. For now, though, they can just think about what that means.